The opera came out of the blue. Colin Matthews had read some of my books, and I got this lovely, long handwritten letter saying, ‘have you ever thought of writing a libretto to an opera?’ We met and hit it off – neither of us had any particular idea of what we wanted to do, but Colin talked about Chekhov, and I had written a play that was based on two Chekhov short stories (I’m somewhat obsessed with Chekhov). I had lit upon this particular story of his called A Visit to Friends, and came up with this idea of an opera-within-an-opera – of a kind of early 20th-century Russian opera being rehearsed today. And that intrigued me: we could cut between life and the opera – what was going on in the rehearsal room, and how was life imitating art? We had a workshop at Snape Maltings with professional singers – one of the great days of my working life. It’s amazing to me that it’s about to have its world premiere on June 13, this tiny spark that ignited over lunch in the Chelsea Arts Club all those years ago has now come to full incandescence.

I grew up in Africa, in Ghana. My mother would play music in the sitting room which would waft over the compound to where my bedroom was. She used to play a lot of opera, Victoria de Los Ángeles and various other singers of that era. So that’s the first time my ears began to respond to classical music. I was learning to play the piano – Für Elise and so on – but I was an unhappy pianist. But we had did have a good music teacher at my school, and though we were a most recalcitrant bunch of boys somehow he forced us to listen to music, and I began to like what I was hearing. I remember the programmes that Ken Russell did for Omnibus on the BBC – the first I saw was about Delius and it really bowled me over, and I think that’s the source of my love of English music of the early 20th century. And that led me to other English composers of that period. He also did ones on Vaughan Williams, on Mahler, on Richard Strauss – I watched them all avidly, and it was a real trigger to generate my musical taste. And then I just followed my nose – enthusiasms were all that I needed to go and buy the recording. But there are these little groupings within this broader taste, like American minimalism, early 20th-century English music, Russian music of the late 19th century – maybe that’s my Chekhov enthusiasm – and in my collection of CDs you can spot you those sections.

I wrote a novel called Love is Blind. It’s very hard to write fiction about music – there are very, very few good novels that are about it – but I thought ‘how do I get into that world?’ And rather than writing about a virtuoso, I thought I’d write about somebody who was essential to a virtuoso: a piano tuner. Someone was tuning the big Steinway in the Chelsea Arts Club, and I thought it the perfect entrée to the world of music. Then I found through a friend of a friend the Chief Piano Technician at the Royal College of Music, Clive Ackroyd, and he let me pick his brains relentlessly over a series of lunches, and so all the arcane detail of piano tuning in the novel is thanks to him. I had this theory that are certain passages in music that no matter how you hear them, they bring tears to your eyes. And it could be Rachmaninov, or a rock’n’roll number, but something about the sequence has this effect on one. I went to a friend of mine, a very eminent film composer called Patrick Doyle, with seven pieces of music in which I could identify the exact moment when you got that little twinge in your tear ducts. And I said, ‘what’s going on there?’ And I think, to put it very briefly, it’s the unexpected. You think you know where the music is going, but then it doesn’t go that way, and that creates a slight reaction in you. And if it’s plangent and moving, then it’s all the more powerful. Love is Blind is an attempt to explain this theory, though of course it actually became a novel about obsessive love and mania.

The contemporary music I listen to most often is world music. The first music I heard was small groups of kids who would come to the house, often at Christmas or holidays, and play percussive instruments and dance, in return for a shilling or two. These kids would have gourds with seeds in them, or a tin with a stick, and create a kind of percussive backdrop to a dance. But the innate musicality or the innate percussive sense in them allowed them to create a kind of combo on the stoop of our house, to play five minutes of driving rhythmic music. It obviously made a phenomenal impression on my young self.

‘A visit to Friends’ is at the Aldeburgh Festival on June 13